MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Looking back, the gridiron fates weren’t aligning for the St. Francis High football team — or heartland rocker John Mellencamp — that day.
It goes back to that St. Francis game against Hundred, down the road in Wetzel County.
That was the contest St. Francis won, but still managed to lose, no matter if Dan “Zip” Shearer, the bruising running back for the Catholic school from Morgantown, did manage to find the end zone on every other carry, it seemed.
That was the contest where defensive coordinator Bob Musick gave a throat-searing, pre-game, bellowing call to arms … to the kids in the band.
“Wrong bus,” the defensive coach said, sheepishly. “I got on the pep bus. That still comes up.”
And, that was the contest where head coach Tony Fragale revealed, in language on the other side of PG-13, that he was no fan of the aforementioned Mellencamp, whose song, “Jack and Diane” (that little ditty about two kids growing up in the American heartland) was all over the radio.
Someone on the team with a cassette tape and a boom box had the audacity to punch up the song, to Fragale’s thundering anger.
Coach Tony suggested what Jack might do with that chili dog outside the Tastee Freez, while also allowing the possibility of the very boom box itself existing outside the confines of the team bus, if say, the “off” switch wasn’t employed — pronto.
“Coach advised that Jack and Diane wouldn’t be accompanying us,” quarterback Todd Gregg said, in rueful understatement.
“Well, we weren’t used to losing back then,” Shearer seconded.
From average to great (a coach’s way)
Both men laughed as they looked back, but it was the kind of reaction that’s usually followed by a sad shrug, and maybe the blinking of a tear or two.
Fragale, 70, died Wednesday after battling colon cancer for nearly four years. A memorial service is pending.
The old coach could be just as tender as he was tough, and that’s what his former players and other students in his classes at St. Francis were choosing to remember on the day after.
Fragale over the years was active in promoting alumni activities of the former high school. The license plates on the cars coming in told the tale: Alabama to Alaska.
“Everybody wanted to come back because of him,” said Shearer, who last exchanged text messages with his old coach three weeks ago.
“That’s a testament to him as a teacher and a coach.”
“Coach taught us about respect and integrity,” Gregg said. “He’d say that when we put on that uniform, we were representing both ourselves and the guys who wore it before.”
And that was the other thing, the quarterback continued.
“He could take an average player, and turn him into a great athlete. You just had to listen to what he was telling you.”
It worked. Several of those athletes, including Shearer, went on to play Division I or Division II ball.
And Fragale’s St. Francis players from 1982-85 compiled a 38-2 record. His 1985 team took it all the way to Class A state championship, losing to Sistersville in the title game.
It was easy, Musick said. All you had to do was diagram plays. And then diagram more plays.
“We’d work until 1:30 or 2 in the morning,” Musick said. “We’d have every wall covered.”
They were also friends. Fragale was godfather to Musick’s son, and he was also a groomsman at his wedding.
“Tony’s one of those people that you’re fortunate to know and to have in your life,” he said.
That was whether he was coaching your kid, Musick said, or holding court at the Panera Bread in Suncrest, where his running monologues always drew an appreciative audience.
‘How most people would love to be remembered’
Three years ago, Fragale got to be a football coach again.
An alumni flag football game was staged during reunion weekend for St. Francis. Fragale coached the Black team, and Musick was on the opposite sideline as the head guy for Red.
Gregg was once again Fragale’s quarterback.
“It was something being out there and running the old drills,” Gregg said.
Fragale was buoyant, even if he was in the literal battle of his life.
“I haven’t had chemo for five or six weeks,” he said then. “A lot of my tumors have shrunk. Some have disappeared.”
Fragale’s brother, Sam, now a businessman in North Carolina, said Tony wasn’t just talking.
“My big brother never gave up,” he said. “That’s how he was. He went to work right after he was diagnosed. For three years, no one kicked cancer’s ass better.”
Sam Fragale said his brother was heartened any time an old St. Francis grad called him, “Coach.”
Tony would be just as proud, Sam said, of the message received on his behalf from another Morgantown guy with a coaching connection.
Tommy Bowden, the former Clemson coach, grew up in Morgantown, watching his father, Bobby Bowden, patrolling the sidelines as the leader of WVU’s football Mountaineers.
Bowden, the younger was friends with Coach Tony on Facebook.
He felt compelled to reach out to a grieving brother when he got the news.
“What a great legacy he left,” one coach wrote of another.
“I was shocked at the number of lives he had such a positive impact on. For him, it came naturally. He will be remembered how most people would love to be remembered.”
